1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a product information providing apparatus and a method for managing and providing electronic product information, and in particular to a product information providing apparatus and a method capable of providing product information most suitable for the use environment of the product.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, breakthroughs in technology have developed and introduced into the market more complicated and sophisticated products one after another. Such product is accompanied with a balky operation manual which gives relatively detailed instructions to allow users to master the functions provided in the product, or with a basic manual which gives minimum required instructions to use the product. These manuals often include drawings and illustrations to help the user comprehend the contents.
However, even if a manual describes each of the functions in an easy-to-understand manner, it is becoming more difficult for a user to find necessary information from the manual having an enormous number of pages. It often happens that the user eventually finds out that he/she has been searching information not included in the manual. Moreover, it is often the case that the user does not always keep the manual handy, and has to look for the manual when necessary. Even if the manual is kept at a specific location, it will take some time for the user to fetch the manual, and it is impossible to acquire necessary information at once.
There have been proposed electronic manuals to solve these problems. However, they are not more than digitized equivalents of conventional manual books. It can hardly be said that such electronic manuals have solved the problems as described above. Moreover, the electronic manuals now available are not able to fully utilize the great variety of sophisticated functions.
According to a conventional technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2001-312462, an operating manual request code received from an image processing device is analyzed to retrieve requested operating method information from storage means, and the specific operating method information thus retrieved is downloaded to the request-originating image processing device. A user is thus not required to provide detailed information about current conditions of his/her image processing device to obtain a relevant part of the manual information corresponding thereto, and to be guided with appropriate operating instructions to operate the image processing device smoothly.
However, according to the conventional technique disclosed in the Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2001-312462, the specific operating method information is downloaded based on an operating manual request code, but this technique is not more than digitizing the contents of a manual book and taking out a necessary part therefrom in a unit of a chapter or a section to display the same. The operation manual according to the conventional technique does not contain detailed information given by animation, for example. Further, since the manual is downloaded to a client terminal, the terminal requires an additional mechanism (resource) for this purpose.